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The smoke’s back … as if you haven’t noticed.

We knew it was coming, even before fires of various origins began popping up across all compass points.

Inversion zone, wind currents, oppressive heat. Check. Dingy skies, AQI — lather, rinse, repeat.

It’s now part of our natural order of things in the Rogue Valley. We know the drill. We adjust our lives and trundle on. What choice do we have?

Once more into the breach.

No one ever does anything about the weather, it’s said, no matter how much we talk about it. Add that to the list — you know, the list of problems so big and so all-encompassing that the norm is to discuss and argue and then, satisfied with our due diligence, head off to bed.

And try to close our eyes — literally, that is, after having done so figuratively.

The smoke, however, is insidious. It sticks to us. Take a shower in the morning, wash away yesterday, walk outside … and there it is again.

It stays with us in the stinging of our eyes, the coughs it elicits, the way our sinuses radiate headaches. It stays with us on our clothing, our vehicles, our streets.

We adjust and trundle on.

The smoke unsettles us. We know that because there’s smoke, there are flames. Somewhere. Sometimes, because of the wind currents and the inversion layer, the flames could be hundreds of miles away.

Sometimes, the flames are too close. Just over the hill. In someone else’s backyard.

“I went to sleep Friday night watching the (news of the) Hawaii fires. It’s just so sad what’s happening there,” Wayne Morgan, of Phoenix, said a week ago.

“To wake up and go back and see fire and smoke behind my house, I couldn’t believe it.”

The fire in Phoenix burned in the same area as Almeda, in the early hours of the morning last Saturday. Neighbors woke each other once again, hoses — from homeowners and fire trucks — were deployed.

The fire, this fire, was knocked down. But what damage hadn’t been done to properties and landscapes had taken a toll.

“We can’t continue to live like this,” said Jodi Joe, who, like many, saw the shadow of Almeda in last week’s fire.

“We can’t continue to live in a traumatic situation,” she said. “I’m sick of this. When is enough, enough?”

A fire in the scar of Almeda. A fire on the hills below the Rogue Valley Manor. Grass fires here, grass fires there. Smoke heading north from Yreka, south from Wimer, east from Agness, west from Klamath Falls.

When is enough, enough?

We track the fires now. We understand the terrain on which they live and grow. Every threat of lightning sets our gears in motion. The season is upon us, and we follow it with reluctant obsessiveness.

It is dramatic, though we’d rather not live with such drama.

Eventually, we hope, someone will do something about the weather, about the human activity, about the terrain that gives fires their lives.

Until then, we drag out our masks, stay inside when the air is a threat — as even the air is a threat — and, for the most part, trundle on.

And each night we head off to bed, tired of how the natural order of things has evolved, and try to close our eyes.

Under blankets of smoke.